The present invention relates to a printer managing apparatus, a printer system and a printer setting method, and more particularly to a printer managing apparatus with a logical printer which enables a client to handle a plurality of physical printers as a single printer, a printer system having a plurality of printers, and a printer setting method for grouping the plurality of printers.
The technology of developing network systems such as a personal computer LAN is in progress now. In such a network system, computing services which are flexible and have a wide range of applications are provided and all resources connected to the network have to be effectively utilized with cooperation among them. Particularly, because resources such as printers are frequently used, easy to use high quality services must be provided for users.
Windows NT (Trade Mark of Microsoft Corp. of U.S., hereinafter this indication is omitted) has been widely accepted the mainstream among those network systems. A logical printer is one of the printer services offered by Windows NT. The logical printer means an environment in which a plurality of physical printers have been grouped together. By introducing the logical printer concept, it becomes possible to provide a user with a service of the sort that allows a job fed into the logical printer to be outputted from a not-printing physical printer which is automatically selected.
However, because the plurality of physical printers thus grouped together, printer drivers corresponding to only printers having equal output capabilities are used, and consequently all the physical printers in the group most have equal output capabilities.
Therefore, it has not been feasible to group physical printers having different output capabilities. Assuming that, for example, a physical printer is capable of outputting printing papers of A4 and B4 in size and another physical printer is capable of outputting a printing paper of only A3, these two physical printers have not been able to be grouped to constitute a logical printer.
Also, in a network system, when a client issues a print job, a print server managing a plurality of printers selects a printer for executing the print job in accordance with a designated printer or print attribute. For the handling of the plurality of printers, there is a technique in which a plurality of printers are handled as a single printer by grouping those printers (for example, Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication Nos. Sho. 59-87539 and Hei. 5-303475). For the determination of a printer to be used, there is a proposal in which since the printers have various attributes, the assignment of a job to a printer is determined on the basis of the attribute of the printer (for example, Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. Hei. 4-369713).
When a virtual logical printer formed by grouping a plurality of physical printers is registered, it is necessary to set an attribute value in the logical printer. However, since various kinds of attributes are present, when a manager sets the attribute information in a logical printer depending on the attribute information of the physical printers, it is very difficult to set up the attribute information of the logical printer without any contradiction to the attribute information of the physical printers that form the logical printer.